My two cents

Try to have a basic understanding of your peers

 Whenever you start a project where you are interacting with people from a new field, can, might be developers very technical people might be communications people, might be HR people or might be pure business people.

I think it's always valuable to try to understand a bit of the language and the culture from where they come.

 The one thing that has helped me is to have a bit of a general culture about this kind of stuff.

You know, even without being a specialist on business, because I'm definitely not, but at least knowing a few of the terms that I feel comfortable in a conversation and I understand from what they speak, even if I don't understand all of the details.

I think it's having a bit of a general business culture helps.

Ask the dumb questions

The other thing which is lovely: you can always ask questions.

Because that's always a, a and it's a powerful move, which is once you have a bit just the basic general culture that helps you to understand contexts. Then when you ask a question and you play the dummy, you know it. When you say KPI, which type of KPI do you really mean? You know is this really is this a KPI for you?

And then people start to teach you stuff. In the way they teach you stuff  they're revealing the culture and their understanding of the company . Mm-hmm.

I find always so funny that  people use the same terms with different meanings within the same organization.

For example if you're working on a project, what's positioning for someone might be measures for someone else just because the terms they use, they don't use them in the same way, which is not a problem if you are okay to ask: "When you say measure, can you, can you give me an example?"

And then the person says, "Oh, I mean this."

In the end, people within the same organization don't use the terms in the same way. Some people try to fight it by creating a common language and making sure that everyone is aligned, which is a good way to do it. But if that's not your goal, then just asking the stupid question helps not only yourself but also all your colleagues who never dared to ask the question.

And so to be of service, for the company, ask the stupid questions. Even if you already know the answer for yourself, just assume that the other one might have another answer. Which will reveal a lot.

 It's a thing that I'm still learning. As I come with my own definitions once we do the work, suddenly I realize, shit we didn't have the same meaning for the same terms. They have another definition.

I forgot to give an example. I forgot to say, when I say that, I mean this.

Dictionary

I have one more resource for you. It's a dictionary of innovation terms, business terms, Service Design terms.

It has 400 terms in it, which I took out from many different places and collected there, and where you can then go back to the original source.

I didn't take the most academic definitions by design, but rather the definitions that were simple.

There is also playlists in it where you can find the business 101 terms or Service Design 101 terms.

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